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Dr. Seymour Trotter is a psychoanalyst who keeps his word. His end of the bargain with a patient who stops her dangerous sexual acting-out is to spend a weekend with her in a hotel room. For Dr. Seymour Trotter, age 71, this postanalytic tryst is part of his developing “creative” technique. Both general reader and psychoanalyst will, I am certain, assure themselves rather quickly that this risqué beginning to Lying on the Couch is in the service of satire. Dr. Trotter's confession, culminating in his self-stylization as a “high-priced geriatric gigolo!” (p. 29), is a comic shtick influenced by Portnoy's novel-length complaint to Dr. Spielvogel, famous author of “The Puzzled Penis.” The puzzle in Yalom's novel is how Ernest Lash, who hears the case of the straying senior analyst for his institute's ethics committee, does not himself fall prey to the blandishments of a patient out to seduce him so that she may bring him before his own ethics board. Dr. Lash is saved, not by his supervisor, who thinks that Ernest's curiosity about psychoanalysis is matched by his ignorance of technique, but by the good Dr. Trotter.
Ernest follows Trotter not in erring but in a technique that “is to abandon technique. “As Trotter explains, emphasizing his innovation, “My technique is to tell the truth” (p. 43). Armed with this “openness,” Ernest confesses to Carole, the alluring patient, that he is sexually attracted to her. Credit for the cure that quickly